It’s funny, I went to college and got my degree in mechanical engineering. I’m glad I went and it’s definitely made my career easier. However, as a power plant operator, in my state a degree isn’t needed, just licensing.
I went to university (Australia). I struggled a lot but finally made it through with a Computer Science degree, just in time for AI to fuck everything up. Now I’m a year and a half post-degree and still unable to get a job.
As for why, I went because it was the “right” thing to do. My younger sister got a degree and a “real” job and was doing well. She’s the golden child, and I guess I wanted that praise and love from my parents too. So I went to uni to get a degree too. But I’m still failing. Still worthless in their eyes.
No, I did not. I started college right out of high school, with a focus on architectural engineering, but dropped out after a single semester for a number of reasons. My parents needed me to work full time to help pay for the house (even though I was moved out and trying to pay for most things on my own already). I couldn’t juggle all the responsibility that entailed between helping family, more than full time employment, and school. I had to cut one of those things out, but figured I would go back to school after things became balanced. While working a number of jobs from food service, manufacturing, security, and construction, I gained promotions and made some decent pay, so I just never picked the torch back up in 15 years. I gained some unique and diversified skills through my experiences, and now I work in a machine shop running manual and CNC lathes. It’s the kind of applied science I imagined when I was initially interested in engineering, and it is low stress and I’m not struggling financially (mostly, ha). I’d still like to go to school, but not just to get ahead in my career or make more money. I really enjoy learning and I spend as much of my free time reading and trying to understand new concepts as my brain can handle, everything from geology to calculus to music theory to critical theory. I’m all over the place. Definitely not as good as a dedicated education, though.
I studied philosophy and history of art as a double major for undergraduate. Doing a humanities degree was the right decision at the time for me. Should mention that I didn’t have to pay tuition fees as a Scottish person in Scotland.
During that degree I ended up getting interested in Linux since I enjoyed seeing a practical example of altruism in the real world. Laterally I did a masters in Computing at a former polytechnic uni and have been working as a programmer ever since. Analytic philosophy actually maps onto coding really nicely since they are both ultimately concerned with discrete mathematics. I did have to take on a student loan for that degree but it didn’t take me long to pay it off. It wasn’t computer science since I didn’t have the prerequisite STEM undergraduate degree but it focused on practical aspects of computing like developing desktop applications with Java, webdev with C# and JS, databases with SQL and introduction to operating systems.
It also helped that in my advanced logic classes in philosophy I’d studied the Church Turing thesis, which is just about the most fundamental concept in Comp.Sci.
Yeah, I wanted to go and learn more shit, didn’t matter what (and my parents didn’t care either), I just wanted to learn more. Eventually landed on biology and got a BS. I still wanted to learn more so I got a PhD in biology. I’m a postdoc now and still learning and discovering cool things.
Relative to my qualification i’m paid like shit and nothing about my position is permanent, so it’s stressful. I love my job though, and don’t regret my path through higher ed…except maybe that I’d like to have learned skills to be able to fix my own car.
don’t regret my path through higher ed
Except the US killed all basic science support, and other countries are not making up the shortfall.
I did but had no direction and left after 3 years. Children, marriage, and returned at age 35 for a 2-year healthcare degree. Glad i went back. Sometimes i wish I’d known at 17 that this would be my path but then I probably would have skipped the kids and marriage - the things i didn’t know i wanted and the relationships that make my life rich and worthwhile.
The only direction I really had was the example set by my parents. They were/are social workers and we ALWAYS struggled financially. I picked something interesting to me that I knew made good money. I still do plenty of volunteer work and events with the companies my parents work for. But my job isn’t social work and never will be. Not to bash social workers in any way shape or form, just a severely underpaid path.
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I got a two year English degree and now work in tech. It was primarily focused on creative writing, which doesn’t help much in my field.
I have a Master’s in English but I’m the IT expert in the family, not my wife, who has a PhD in Informatics and develops agent-based simulations.
I did twice. First right after high school, and many years later, my work offered to pay for a master’s program.
Now, I work at a college, so technically, I go to college every day and plan to until retirement.
Hell yeah
At the time I went to college, I planned to become a librarian. 2008 happened when I was graduating and looking at getting into a library so I could qualify for a scholarship on my master’s, and things didn’t work out. I’m now in marketing. I don’t know if I’m using anything from college or not anymore, because it’s been 15 years and it’s just a blur.
I had a career plan to make college worth the money and time. The economy fell apart just in time for that to be impossible. I was struggling until about 2017, when I briefly got into private education.
I got a bachelors and masters degree in engineering. I needed at least the bachelors degree for licensure.
I use it every day at work.
Sort of…
I did get accepted, but FUCKING DEPRESSION DERAILED MY LIFE
FUUUUUUUUUUU
i withdrew…
mom got so disappointed in me…
Not even an "A"sian anymore…
fuck my life
now I’m just a puddle of "D"epression
now my older brother has something to make fun of me about… he got a degree and now I bet he feels so smug about it…
like, bro: shut the fuck up bitch ass dipshit, you caused me so much trauma
/end rant
Sorry to hear that friend.
If he ever gloats about having a degree, I’ve had success with tossing back “in order for me to feel insulted, I would have to value your opinion”
Its made two relatives block me and my mother in law call several relatives to cry and moan about how evil and manipulative I am because when she responded with multiple gigantic run-on paragraph/sentences in a row, I hit her with “lol. I ain’t gonna read all that”
People who take pleasure in how much better they believe their lives or decisions are typically can’t stand it when someone else doesn’t fucking care
Doesn’t matter, he’s gonna laugh when he manage to win over my mother and get my half of the inheritance. Their empire that I help build, that I deserve.
Doesn’t matter when he gets to live life easily, and I end up homeless, possibly en up in a concentration camp getting sweeped up in ICE raids.
My parents are so fucking ablist. They think giving me anything is a waste. “Go live off welfare, you useless shit”, completely disregarding that donald fucling trump is cutting off all the social services right now.
They want me to die.
I have no one else, if my parents cut me off, I’m as good as dead.
After all that I help y’all with, this is how I get betrayed.
Fuck this, I’d rather ICE just get us all, at least we’d be in hell together.
“Filial piety” lmfao fuck this
Fuck confucious.
Undergrad in History and International Relations, because I intended to become a diplomat. Realized an anxiety disorder was probably not going to make that a good career choice. Decided to go to nursing school, got an associates in “science” working on the pre-reqs and then decided to go to grad school for public health and epidemiology instead.
Honestly I love school, I don’t regret any of it except that I was too nervous about quitting my job (I worked my way through to cover what grants and loans didn’t) to do a term abroad. I should have taken the five weeks in Berlin.
I did a year of literature when I didn’t know what to do in my life. I always liked computers so after that I applied to a computer science school. There I had a lot of fun and met a lot of people, some I still have in my life, learned some useful mindsets. Before I managed to get an actual degree I started working. From NOC engineer to software developer where I happily stayed. Did I need my higher education? Probably not, but I think it gave me another perspective and friends and many fun memories.
I got a degree in STEM that hasn’t been useful to me. Turns out the sorts of jobs I got it for don’t really exist anymore/around me, and where they do, they pull from other more traditional graduate and post-graduate pools. At this point it’s been long enough since I got it without working a role related to my field that it’d be pretty hard to get hired into even if the labor market wasn’t falling apart. So I switched gears and applied my breadth of knowledge to a different goal, and that’s a work in progress. Time will tell if it’s successful.
But I started when I was in my mid 20s, and it was a very good time of my life, even with a lot of negative life events in that time. If I could be a professional student, I would have loved to.
However, I tried to pursue a masters through online courses, but I wasn’t really excited about the specificity of it (I’m more of a generalist), and I wasn’t in the right mental state to do it properly, so I withdrew. So who knows if professional student would have really worked for me or not.
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